Thursday, June 7, 2018

When Sony/Columbia Pictures, which held the film rights to one of Marvel’s iconic superheroes Spider-Man, went into an agreement with Marvel Pictures to allow the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler to appear on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (played by Tom Holland), they reserved the right to continue making their own films connected to the Spider-Man comic mythos, if not as part of the MCU itself. That explains their “Venom” spinoff with an alternate take on a Spider-Man adversary played by Tom Hardy, and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, which just had a new trailer released by Sony several months after its initial teaser.

The Hollywood Reporter has it that a new and longer trailer has been put up by Sony Pictures Animation for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, the 3D-animated feature film spinoff of the highly popular Marvel hero. To be precise, it is about an alternate version of the main Spider-hero Peter Parker: a younger half-African-American and half-Puerto Rican Brooklyn youth named Miles Morales. Story details remain sparse even with this new preview on the movie, although it does help to nail down more of its voice cast, comprised of rapper-actor Shameik Moore as Miles and Jake Johnson from “New Girl” as Peter.

Miles is portrayed in the trailer as a hapless New York schoolboy who is a tad embarrassed by his rather overprotective police officer father, while feeling some affinity for the superhero Spider-Man. After he finds himself awakening superhuman abilities upon being bitten by a strange spider, Miles stumbles into a battle between Spider-Man and a monster, where he and Peter learn of each other. The older hero then becomes something of a mentor figure for Miles, teaching him how to use his powers and instilling on him a sense of heroic responsibility and unique self-identity. For while Miles can do what Spider-Man can, Peter advises him, “Don’t do it like me; do it like you.”

What follows next are a cornucopia of intensely frenetic action set pieces with both Peter and Miles in costume fighting a variety of similarly colorful opponents, as well as some moments of humor like Officer Morales insisting his son say “I love you” to him before entering school (done by the bullhorn on his car, even). One breakout segment however depicts the entrance of another – female – Spider-person, similarly famous alternate Spider-Gwen (Stacy) voiced by Hailee Steinfeld who is also starring in “Transformers” 2018 spinoff “Bumblebee”.